Empire Director Lee Daniels On Mining His Own Life for Content

He’s an Oscar nominee, the co-creator of the sublimely preposterous smash hit Empire, and the man bringing Richard Pryor’s life to the big screen. But who is Lee Daniels? Just watch his movies, watch his show—it’s all in there, even the ugliest parts

Lee Daniels got a phone call this morning from one of the several people he trusts to help him manage his career and reputation, and the message, he says, was basically this: “You really should be careful, you know, what you put out there.” He is aware that he has a reputation for speaking—to journalists, to studio executives, to strangers at parties—without much of a filter. So he’s trying to be careful. He’s 55 now, and though he’s been honest, maybe to a fault, about himself, his life, and his failings ever since his second film, 2009’s Precious, received six Academy Award nominations and made people curious about Lee Daniels, there are now other interested parties to consider besides himself. At the moment, as he sits at the Sunset Tower in Hollywood, miles away from his longtime New York City home, he owes Fox the first episode of the second season of his music-family drama, Empire. He’s prepping his next film, a Richard Pryor biopic, starring Mike Epps. And next week he’ll announce he’s developing a show called Star, about a girl group trying to make it in Atlanta—a little TLC, a little Supremes, but set in the modern day, like Empire.

They told him to be careful, so he’s trying, even though there are things he wants to say about television and _Empire’_s overwhelming success that he knows he shouldn’t. Put it this way, he says finally: For years, TV networks have underestimated the intelligence of the American public. They’ve underestimated Lee Daniels. Like with Precious. Or Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which made
$175 million. “Everybody all my life has always said, ‘Oh, no one’s gonna see that movie. We’re not gonna make that movie.’ These studios: ‘Who wants to see a movie about an obese woman?’ A lot of people. We were told that The Butler was not gonna do well. We were laughed out of every studio. You know? This has changed, baby.”

There are not a lot of studios laughing at Daniels now. With Empire, Daniels and his co-creator, Danny Strong, took a show about an African-American family in the music world—with the soap-opera-by-way-of-Shakespeare premise of a terminally ill executive (Terrence Howard’s Lucious Lyon) dodging his ex-con ex-wife (an on-fire Taraji P. Henson) while figuring out which of his three sons (played by Trai Byers, Jussie Smollett, and Bryshere Y. Gray) will inherit his business—and discovered a massive audience the networks didn’t even know existed. Ten million people watched the premiere, back in January, a startling number that was not nearly as startling as the number of people who watched the finale:
17.6 million. The population of a small European country watching a show that, despite its avalanche of gunplay and bib-assisted blow jobs, contains more blunt, complicated reality about black life—in its earnest grappling with spirituality, homophobia, and mental illness—than practically any other show on network television this century. The kind of show where people talk without first running their thoughts through a network-executive
translator—the kind of show where people say things like “Bye, Felicia!” without stopping to explain what “Bye, Felicia!” means.

“The people have been starving for this,” Henson says. “Starving for this. Then it was ‘Oh, it’s a black thing.’ Mm-mm. You can’t say that anymore! People are identifying with these people, period.”

Empire more or less single-handedly saved Fox, though it was conspicuously absent on the Emmy nominations list—a couple for costumes, one for Henson, but otherwise shut out of the main event. Daniels went on Instagram and posted an entertaining tirade after that—“Fuck these motherfuckers!”—but he says he’s not actually worrying too much about the snub. Maybe he shouldn’t say this, but: “Terrence Howard calls me up after, and he goes, ‘You okay?’ I said, ‘Dude. You’re on a fucking hit show! How much money are we fucking making? How much was your fucking paycheck last week, motherfucker?’ ”

He’s been at this a long time. He started in Hollywood as a casting agent back in the ’80s. He became a producer in 2001 and pretty much immediately helped Halle Berry win the first Oscar ever to go to a black actress in a leading role, for Monster’s Ball. And he’s done it in his own Lee Daniels–ish way. When he decided he wanted to direct, with 2006’s no-budget Shadowboxer, he cast Dame Helen Mirren as an assassin, Cuba Gooding Jr. as her loyal life partner, Stephen Dorff as a randy villain, and a zebra, for reasons that no one ever acknowledges or explains.

Everything he’s made—Precious, The Paperboy, The Butler, Empire—has that same strange, Technicolor glaze, that heady mix of desire and violence and sly jokes, which is to say that it’s all deeply weird, like some cartoon sex dream you might not even admit to having. But in doing so, he’s gradually moved from the edge of the industry all the way to the center of it. In a position of power like none he’s ever had before…right?

“It’s true. But here’s what I feel about that. The suits just change. I don’t. I’m the same dude. I’m that same cat. I’m that same cat that made the two-dollar hit Shadowboxer. I’m that same dude.”

You mean the suit becomes a bigger suit?

“No,” Lee Daniels says, grinning. Then he does the thing they told him not to do.

“They get replaced. I stay the same.”

Another bit of conversation that’ll probably get Lee Daniels in trouble:

What do TV networks get wrong about the intelligence of the American public?

“I don’t have an education. But I’ve never not listened to my voice. That voice has kept me alive. It’s kept me away from bullets. It’s kept me away from HIV. That
I don’t have it is a miracle from God. It’s put me where I’m at right now, opposite you. I think it’s God.”

Why do you say that about HIV?

“I’ll be 56 in December. When it first came out, all my friends died. Every one of them. Every boyfriend I had. Every friend I had. And I didn’t know how to get it. We didn’t know how you were getting it, whether you touched somebody, whether you… That I didn’t get it is a miracle. It’s a miracle.”

What do you chalk that miracle up to?

“I have no idea. So much so that I felt that I should have died, and I threw myself into the abyss of drugs. Like, ‘Why am I here, when there are people that have better souls, that are nicer, kinder people, that are dying in my arms?’ ”

So your reaction to surviving was to basically become…

“A drug addict. And then I got over that. I use that for my work. That’s gonna get me in trouble again. I don’t care.” He laughs.
“I don’t care. Just do what you gotta do.”

One thing you realize really quickly about Lee Daniels is that it’s all autobiography. Everything he makes is about himself. Which is funny, because his work tends to depict things that have never happened to anyone, ever. Like right now, say, we’re watching the first episode of _Empire’_s second season in an editing bay, and there is a person in a gorilla suit being lowered in a cage onto a stage at an ersatz Black Lives Matter rally, followed by a cavalcade of black celebrities—one cameo after another. It’s like The Avengers for people who don’t get to be in The Avengers. Daniels is wearing white jeans and a black Henley, and when the person in the gorilla suit removes the gorilla’s head, he reaches over and grabs my shoulder. “This is how we start, honey!” he yells happily. “Yes, Gawd!”

He stands and paces around the room, working on calibrating the precise degree of provocation in the shot. He is not unaware that it will bother people to open the season with a caged gorilla parachuting into the signal social movement of our time. He’s just trying to figure out how much it will bother people. He is accustomed to being exposed, to feeling vulnerable. The central image of Empire so far was a flashback of Lucious throwing his 5-year-old high-heel-wearing son into a trash can. This is something that actually happened to Daniels: “Just by putting myself out there on a limb—that is what’s healing to me.”

He’s been doing this since the beginning. Shadowboxer, despite the zebra, is a sad and longing movie about revenge and surrogate families, two things Daniels knows something about: His father, a Philadelphia police officer, was killed when Daniels was a teenager; much later, Daniels adopted his imprisoned brother’s twins, whom he has since raised as his own. Precious is basically one long statement about a deeply traumatized child finding love and self-acceptance outside her home. Even The Butler, which was based on another man’s story, is also about fathers and sons and the stubbornly unrecognized value of black life.

“Me, I’m messy. I’m messy, messy, messy,” Daniels says. That quality is embedded in his work; often it has seemed like its signature quality—messy, messy, messy. The New York Times, reviewing Shadowboxer, wrote that the film “leaves you with your mouth hanging open—partly in admiration of its audacity and partly in disbelief at its preposterousness.” Six years later, the same paper called The Paperboy, not entirely disapprovingly, “a hot mess.”

The last review he says he deliberately read, back in 2005, called him a hack, and to this day, “I use that line. I call myself a hack whenever I get angry at myself.”

Do you recognize the quality in your work that reviewer was trying to put a finger on?

“I think that whoever that guy is, I would imagine he’s probably a white man. He hasn’t walked in my shoes. So he doesn’t know, or he hasn’t smelled the inside of a trash can. So his perspective on life is a completely different perspective. And I respect that he don’t respect it. Check. Next! Don’t tell me that again. I hate that. I hate that.”

That I read it, or that he said it?

“That he said it. And both.”

He turns his attention back to the edit. “Fuck me. Why is she—” Daniels says to his editor. On the screen, we gaze at one of the show’s couples, engaged in some improbable physical contact. “Would she be rubbing sweat on his chest?”

One side effect of _Empire’_s success is that Daniels is often called upon to speak on behalf of African-Americans in his industry—a responsibility he says he relishes. But it can lead to some discordant moments. Earlier this year, The Hollywood Reporter held a roundtable discussion with several writer-producers, including Daniels, House of Cards’ Beau Willimon, Damon Lindelof, and others; the subject of writers’-room diversity came up, and Daniels found himself polling his fellow creators on how many African-American writers they had on their shows. Things got tense; Willimon told Daniels it was a “weird question.”

When I bring this episode up with Daniels, he says diplomatically about Willimon: “He had his right to argue that.” But then he continues: “My experience watching TV since I was a child—that I’m watching white people write the black experience—is offensive to me. And I’m sorry that you’re offended that I’m offended!”

When the person in the gorilla suit at the Black Lives Matter rally removes the gorilla’s head, Daniels reaches over and grabs my shoulder. “This is how we start, honey!”

People seemed mad at you for asking.

“What does that say to you? I can’t even talk about it again, because then I’ll get upset again. I just don’t—I’m trying to understand what that means.”

I think it means that people feel like they’re being accused of something they don’t want to be accused of.

“But are they guilty of it?”

Daniels’s honesty is so seemingly total and endearing that it can take a while to realize that he’s not in fact telling you everything. There is a reason that Daniels holds back parts of his life, and the reason—beyond the obvious human impulse toward self-protection—tends to be that he has yet to mine those parts for a movie or a TV show. For instance: In the Lee Daniels legend, he came to Hollywood with a couple of dollars in his pocket, started a nursing agency that made him a very wealthy man, then sold it and joined the industry with a couple-million-dollar head start.

This is true. He’d been working as a receptionist at an agency, thought he could do better, and did—by his mid-twenties, he had hundreds of people working for him. But it’s also true that his success in Los Angeles was not nearly as immediate as he has sometimes suggested. He tells me, begrudgingly, that he was homeless. He says he was directing
theater at a church. And then he stops himself. “I ain’t gonna talk about it with you, but I did what I had to do. It was a rough time.” Daniels pauses. He describes Star, the girl-group show he’s making: “The lead girl is white, hot, she looks like Anna Nicole Smith but she sings like Amy Winehouse. She’s a little trashy, and she will do anything it takes to get to the top.” The show, he says, is about “what you will do to get to what it is that you got to get to. I’ve never talked about it. But I’m gonna explore it with Star.”

Daniels says that one reason he was drawn to making a film about Richard Pryor—which he’s shooting in 2016 with Epps, Oprah Winfrey, and Kate Hudson—is because he and Pryor have so much in common: “the concept of being true to your art, and also the whole concept of the freebase, the crack pipe—my addiction to cocaine and crack during that time, and understanding him on a very primal level, and understanding why he did it.”

So, Daniels says, “I gotta do Richard Pryor to get that hump off my back, man. It’s the one last thing that I just gotta get out there and shake it, shake the soul. It’s like shaking your underwear out. It’s taking a bath and just like scrubbing your skin from the memory.”

Daniels says he heals himself through the work. Family and friends, though, are more complicated for him—conversations he can have in front of millions are often conversations he’s unable to have at home, even with his own adopted children. “My son is 19 years old, and he’s just finding out that he’s black. He’s struggling right now. I did everything I could to my kids to put them on the Upper West Side, in fancy-ass schools. Because I want them to have what
I didn’t have. Now he’s thrown into the abyss, as a black man, and he knows now, and he’s got a chip on his shoulder with me.”

Why?

“Because I wasn’t honest with him when we were on 74th and Amsterdam as taxis were driving by and not picking us up, and water splashing on us as they go down and pick up the white family. He couldn’t understand why. I didn’t want to have that conversation. It was too fucking ugly.”

Daniels is aware of the irony. “Dude, as honest as I try to be, I couldn’t be that honest with my kids.”

Or he could be, but only through the medium of a TV show. Hakeem, _Empire’_s spoiled princeling, being forced to grow up—that’s how Lee Daniels is able to be honest. “Everything that’s up there is my relationship with my kid,” Daniels says. The show is how he talks to the people he loves.

And lately, Daniels says, they’ve begun to talk back. He recently got a letter from his brother. The same brother who in 1996, according to Daniels, left two kids on their mother’s doorstep, unable to raise them because he was in a prison cell—kids that Daniels would come to love and raise as his own. The same brother, says Daniels, who declined to speak to him for much of his life, on account of his sexual orientation.

But “he sent me a letter from prison recently,” Daniels says. In it, “he says: ‘I’m sorry for hating you just because.’ All these years. He’s been in jail, in and out of jail since he’s been twentyish. ‘I’m sorry for hating you just because.’ Because I was gay.”

What do you think prompted that letter?

“He’s probably the king over there, in
the prison that he’s at. He said they all shut down when Empire comes on. Like, that shit gets silent! You know, don’t come
near the TV. They have to hear it, because there’s no rewind. I mean: That was more important to me than getting a nomination for an Academy Award. For him to tell me that…‘I’m sorry for hating you all these years just because.’ For him to understand that through the work—because of the work!”

The first season’s finale, when Terrence Howard’s character embraces his son…

“Dream.” Then he sings: “Dream on!”

Is that something you had hoped for?

“I think my dad would be blown away by the success of it all. And that demands respect.” Daniels pauses, then tells a story about his father—the elder Daniels was driving once, in West Philadelphia, when…

Actually, Daniels decides, he’s saving that one, too. “I’m gonna put that in, I think. In a flashback. I don’t know whether this season or next season.”

He smiles. “Maybe this season.”

Zach BaronisGQ’sstaff writer.

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Lee Daniels’s Life Is an Open Book/Melodrama

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If you’ve seen his work, you’ve seen his story—whether you knew it or not.— Lu Fong

ON-SCREEN
While promoting this lurid potboiler, Daniels took some heat for a joke he made about shooting Zac Efron in his tighty-whities: “I’m gay,” he told Interview, “so why not?”

REAL L I F E
“I ran around naked all the time growing up,” he added. “My mom would say, ‘Put some fucking clothes on! What’s wrong with you?’ Subconsciously, it was about my personal experience.”

ON-SCREEN
In this biopic based on a real-life White House butler to several presidents, his activist son gets tossed from a family dinner after he takes a dig at his father for serving white people.

REAL L I F E
“From the beginning of our existence here, as African-Americans, we were help,” he told Filmmaker Magazine. “There were several moments where I was embarrassed that my mother had to do this.”

ON-SCREEN
In a flashback during the Empire pilot, Lucious throws his 5-year-old son, Jamal, into a trash can after seeing him strut around in red high heels and a head wrap.

REAL L I F E
“My earliest memory was walking down the stairs in my mother’s heels. My dad—he was a cop—put me in a trash can. He said, ‘You already have it bad, cuz you’re black— now you’re a faggot, too.’ ”